Meta bulks up AI offerings with new headset, glasses, chatbot features

Meta Platforms announced a new entry-level version of its Quest line of mixed-reality headsets and a slew of software enhancements to the AI assistant that has driven interest in the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters on Wednesday.Set to hit shelves on Oct.15, the Quest 3S will be offered in two storage capacity sizes, the smaller one priced at $299.99 and the other at $399.99.With the launch, the company is discontinuing its older Quest 2 and high-end Quest Pro devices, while also dropping the price of the more powerful Quest 3 it introduced last year from $649.99 to $499.99.The Facebook owner also is expected to preview its first augmented-reality glasses and announce updates to its existing virtual-reality and artificial-intelligence products.Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities including Judi Dench and John Cena.“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said.The augmented-reality reveal is a long time in the making for Zuckerberg, who positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum opus when he first pivoted the world’s biggest social media company toward building immersive “metaverse” systems in 2021.However, Meta has struggled to overcome technical challenges with its AR project since then, prompting the head of the company’s metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division to acknowledge last year that a product it could viably bring to market was “still a few years away – a few, to put it lightly.”The company has been plowing tens of billions of dollars into its investments in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies, driving up its capital expense forecast for 2024 to a record ...